


Maps, or the hubris of a self-contained parallel universe

by de_Clare



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Depression, Drama, M/M, Muggle Technology, Oral Sex, Politics, Turkish Baths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 14:31:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3329660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus, in his mid-fifties and somewhat shut-in, explores satellite images of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maps, or the hubris of a self-contained parallel universe

**Author's Note:**

> AU where everyone who died in canon is alive. It's much more interesting that way.

It’s approaching twenty years since the last moment in my life which I could call decisive, and time is even eroding that certainty. Death eaters resurfacing in the global south, appealing to nationalist furor through false claims to indigenous magical power.  One wizard released an immature basilisk in Zimbabwe's Lake Karibi to convince locals that Nyaminyami the River God had re-emerged as a sign that the westernized bourgeois dictatorship had come to an end. Locals rose in a coup, hacking apart anyone in a government uniform—police to social service workers—with machetes and blunt gardening tools. The old order of colonial oppression makes its ignominious exit through public gallows and firing squads…The odd thing was that once the government had been unseated, no one emerged to collect their prize. Increasingly, it seems that the end of power is no longer more power, but rather resembles the impassive neglect of a child shaking an ant farm. And I find similar stories in South America, the Pacific Islands, the Balkans with no discernible pattern but instability and the abdication of responsibility.

Ah, but it’s dark thoughts like this that drive one to despondency, and I’m too old for despondency. I see that life continues and there is no deciding, as despondency promises: I will not engage any longer. Life continues with its needs and habits and eventually hunger, thirst and loneliness drive one forth from one’s burrow. No, I keep moving and discovering.

Which leads me to satellite maps of earth. Strangely, this technological parallel world makes me feel less homesick, with its fluctuating dimensions and temporal simultaneity. Like Sirius’s house compressed—no, existing fully in no space, such is this floating universe to which I connect.  And I wonder, how is my world viewed through this new lens?

First I search for Hogwarts. A text search yields a village in India. Though conceivable, as the central swath of the Hogwarts Express traverses parallel space in order to avoid collision with British rail trains and therefore could emerge in any or no locale, I imagine the winters would have been a little more tolerable.  Cold suppresses my immune response to lycanthropy, so I am more wolf within and beyond the full moon. In more cheerful days, Sirius would sublimate my aggression through rough bdsm take-downs and mad, howling laughter. But now Sirius is much older and the debilities of his time in Azkaban have taken their physical toll. He can take a few steps with a cane, and does so proudly, but he must be economical with such movements. Hoarding his energy for a precious few minutes to delight his old dears and young gentleman callers. Impulsively, I train the satellite image on Constantinople—apparently a café in Montreal—ah, the muggles call it Istanbul these days.

He may be in the Taksim district on the European side, ogling belly dancing young men with a connoisseur’s discernment. Or perhaps sitting at a low table at Mandabatmaz, whimsically translated as: “The foam so thick that even the buffalo did not sink,” as a blue-eyed granddad tends a copper cevze full of chocolatey coffee grounds on thick charcoal. Sirius never lost his enthusiasm for extremes, and exhorted me to join him…  
  
“Ah, but who will tend the garden?” I’d countered.

“The garden is dead!” Sirius is not one to take subtle hints, and instead will drag out the full drama of humiliating confessions.

“Ah, you’re right there. The sunflowers are the last of the season. Their petals, fully formed already curl inward with decay. The bulbous heads will fall one by one and, come February, the first adventurous snowdrops will poke through the ground and pray that the damning frosts have stopped.”  
  
“Moony,” he says when he hopes intimacy will bring me round to his way of thinking, “You look at a flower and you see yourself.”  
  
“Precisely, and that’s why anise liquor, ancient mosaics, wailing calls to prayer and even rent-boys who look like quidditch stars—everything in this miasma you’re proposing—are the same to me as this sunflower.”  
  
“Narcissism,” he barked.  
  
I said nothing. What could I say, after all?  
  
His hand shook minutely on his cane, and I asked, “Would you like some tea?”   
  
“No, thank you, so much to get my head around for this holiday.” He reaches for his wand at his hip.  
  
“Can these weighty considerations wait if I counter with firewhisky?”  
  
He smiled slow and broad. The gray in his beard like the venerable muzzle of an old dog. Yes, trite, but as time wears on the disparate pieces of ourselves resolve and the dog and man become quietly companionable. Well, as quiet as Sirius’s sanguine nature permits.  
  
A single whisky each with a solid, square lump of slowly-melting ice at the base of the tumbler. Quite the masculine aperitif for sex.   
  
Sex with Sirius doesn’t have the perfunctory predictability of roles nor the passion of discovery. In a way, it’s an extension of conversation—dwelling over familiar contours and hollows, like a friendly stroll down an autumnal country lane. Ephemeral things like leaves and fallen flowers fodder for small-talk on an affectionately changeless landscape.   
  
Being in the moment, those are the words we use today for the timeless concept of timelessness. (It is not strange that wizards evince no such periodic surprise at the idea.)

A tug at the roots of my hair reminded me that my mind had wandered while my mouth had enclosed Sirius’s cock and I was embarrassed to realize I couldn’t remember the steps I’d taken to arrive there because they blend so easily with memories of so many sloppy blowjobs. But Sirius loves the sucking sounds and dribbling saliva and ground out moans, sensory sensory, and it draws out a part of myself that spits and grunts and forgets about the damn duvet cover. The bitter back of my throat tasted that he was close, but he gently withdrew past my incisors and guided me off my knees, which cracked as I wobbled upright. I was still wearing my cashmere pullover and trousers—which uncomfortably began to wriggle and tug away from my torso like a tangle of snakes.  
  
“Clothing-animating spell!?” I said, muffled by a recalcitrant shirt collar.  
  
“Don’t fight back, that will only provoke them.” Sirius laughed, sitting up naked with his wand in his lap.  
  
I make a grab for the wand but my shirt cuffs catch me behind my back and I felt a spasm in my spine.  
  
“Argg—getting old for this.”  
  
“Finite incantatum.” The clothing sagged, corduroy bunched on one ankle and my forearms caught in my cuffs, giving Sirius an opening to seize my wrists and nudge me down on my back. He straddles me on his knees, as if he had the thighs of a much younger man, and gently lifted the shirt overhead. I could struggle free, but not without tearing a perfectly serviceable shirt.  
  
He kissed me with a wide, but slowly coiling tongue and caught my cock in his solid palm. I watched the rippling veins and tendons dancing under his skin as he slowly shifted the foreskin down, relieved that being restrained meant, for a moment, feeling no responsibility for whatever the hell I was doing.  
  
“It’s like unwrapping a present,” he said, “only you can open it again and again,” he punctuated each repetition with a gentle up and down glide of his hand and I cringed, instinctively, waiting for him to jerk too high or too low. And it’s precisely that tension and the enclosure that focusses the pleasure intense and local and quite suddenly I was coming on my chest and chin and all over the dark duvet cover.   
  
I closed my eyes and Sirius groaned, the bed springs screeched and he spilled forward, catching himself with one arm and wanking the finishing caresses, rivulets of his come joining mine in an irregular map on my body. I always want to starfish sprawl in these moments, but he pulled the shirt off my wrists and collapsed forward into the mucousey mess, and I felt his body tensing as the numbing rush of endorphins ebbed and the pain of porous bones and wasting muscles returned.

“Thank you…” I began tentatively.  
  
“Shut it.”   
  
It’s more sincere than our lifetime of _I love you_ ’s.  

 

I said that I would clean up, but he insisted. Vanishing my bed linens to a laundry (to my horror) and summoning a spare set from his own home. I’d prefer the familiarity of my own linens, relishing the comfort of the faded wear, but Sirius wanted to stake his claim in my life with his soft flat sheet and his rich smells, so I let him.  
  
When I sensed Turkey coming around in conversation again, I diverted another offer with, “I hope you’ll write me about your exploits.”  
  
He looked away hurt, I imagine, so I added, “Yes, even an old shut-in like me would love to see some of the world, albeit vicariously.”  
  
He brightened, “Then you’ll get such a chronicle that you’ll be apparating into a Turkish bath by next Tuesday.”  
  
“You go to Turkish baths on Tuesday?”   
  
“The over 60s there give me some hope for my erotic future.”   
  
We both laughed, but the darkness returned as I realized what the wasting disease from Azkaban would wreak in his body by 60.

“Well, Remus-- _carpe canum_!” he said cheerfully.  
  
“Seize the dog?”  
  
“Precisely.” He smiled and disapparated. He always had a morbid fear of goodbyes.   
  


That was a week ago Tuesday, and perhaps that’s what draws me to a computer, searching archived images as if I’ll see Sirius smiling under a white awning, beckoning with a short cup smelling strongly of cardamom. If I saw him, at this moment, I don’t think I could resist, despite the history and disappointment and knowing that sometimes two people grow parallel and can’t entwine. Sometimes I just want to be in the moment and not count the costs. But then the crushing reality reinforced by repetition of passionate reunions followed by furtive exits, by one or both of us simultaneously.

At 54, can I reasonably expect someone with hard-won independence and self-confidence to change? And I don’t mean Sirius.   
  
The teacup slips from my hand and shatters on my desk, making the computer blink out of existence. “Bugger.” It was an old bone china cup, delicate with a tiny gilded handle that made the tea drinking all the more unique and glorious.  
  
“Reparo,” I say automatically and the teacup resolves. It’s meant to be seamless, but I can feel the subtle vibration in the magical bonds. Nothing, once broken, resolves in quite the same shape.  
  
The computer, treated with the same charm, blinks frenetically, then gives up the ghost entirely. Perhaps I shouldn’t be meddling with things impervious to magic. Most of my kind view technology with distaste. Perhaps it’s the hubris of a self-contained, parallel universe. It’s unnatural and fascistic to seal away all influence and magic. Yes—that’s it!  
  
I check my watch. I don’t know which bath, or whether Sirius was being completely facetious, but a simple disillusionment charm and I can blend in with the body steam and vapor of a bath, or ten baths, or a hundred—how many Turkish baths are there in Istanbul? Then perhaps I’ll find Sirius before dinner, tangled with some fit, furry geriatric.

And maybe the future won’t matter this time. We will just lay hold of one moment, the only moment. Life.


End file.
